The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.
The
front-room exhibition at Steven Harvey is called Intersection, as in
the interconnections between its two artists, Amanda Church and Jenny
Hankwitz, but in many ways the backroom display of work by Jason Harvey
is an “intersection” too, but a familial intersection, since Jason is
the father of Steven Harvey, the gallery director, who himself was a
serious painter in his youth. In the front gallery, the large
abstractions share so many concerns that at first they appear by
the same artist, but amazingly, the artists barely knew each other
before this show. Church is the more organic, with joyful, buoyant
arabesques growing out of her earlier pop-derived, somewhat erotic
figurative shapes. Hankwitz, whose geometrically structured paintings
balance the thin and thick, large and small, straight and curved,
derives her concepts from sketches made on her computer. What connects
the artists is their sense of visual play, their spatial ambiguity
articulated by flatly painted shapes, their fine-tuned rhythm, large
scale, and even straight-forward palettes of blacks, reds, blues, grays,
whites and pale fleshy pinks. In stark contrast to these clean elegant
dialogues, are the very personal, intimate drawings and paintings by
Jason Harvey. The Harveys are an artistic family, beginning with
Jason’s aunt who knew many of the early 20th century modernist Parisian
artists, to his sister Anne, an artistic prodigy, who became part of the
artistic circle of Brancusi, Matisse and Picasso. She over-shadowed
her brother (see my Dec. 20, 2022 review of Anne Harvey’s show), but as
demonstrated by Jason’s work now on view, he was a sensitive artist in
his own right, circling in NYC’s downtown artworld of the 60’s and 70’s.
We look into his soul in his self-portrait, and feel a loving
tenderness in his still lifes and landscapes, as the stillness he brings
to his close observations creates a quiet grandeur, generosity and
sense of metaphor to his objects of intense focus. Both shows remain on
view through March 8.
@mspants21 @jennyhankwitz @stevenharveyfineartprojects